Yves Bonnefoy traduttore di Shakespeare. Tradurre l'opera, tradurre in opera

The paper aims to retrace the history of Yves Bonnefoy’s involvement with Shakespeare’s works. The first and the second sections focus on the origins of Bonnefoy’s interest in Shakespeare and his translation of Shakespeare’s works, placing this in the context of the contemporary debate on the issue, while also examining Bonnefoy’s own poetics. In the third part, Bonnefoy’s translation of both poetry and drama are analysed, together with some examples from the Sonnets. In the fourth and final section, in the light of Bonnefoy’s theorical statement of «traduction au sens large» (“translation in a broad sense”), we demonstrate how the Shakespearean hypertextuality and intertextuality are present in some of Bonnefoy’s works. We refer to some stagings of Hamlet and Othello, which are considered as “translations” in a personal and poetic form of the dramas written by the Bard, so as to highlight the strong links between Bonnefoy’s and Shakespeare’s works. In so doing, we shed light on the devotion and the similarity of the former to the latter.